ching on the fact that the Rond family
was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....

Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
out of the house....

In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.

Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
thick skins....

I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not
characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most
considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant
articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements
I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during
all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.

"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the
interview."

"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the
way I meant it."

"Oh, all right"--a sigh--"but it's a shame to leave it out."

The last and final outrage--perpetrated by the papers by orders from
above, I am sure....

Even the second uproar had died down.

Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours,
behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely
wherever we went....

But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street
corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....

Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from
New York....

Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people
began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ...
but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.

* * * * *

Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave
out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch
forth in imitation ...

Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about
the country ...

But it was Mrs. Su